My grandmother loved eggrolls. I mean really loved them.
My grandmother married during World War II, and while my grandfather was saving lives in Europe, she waited for him to return so they could start their lives together.
During that time, my grandmother had an eggroll from some long-forgotten restaurant and to hear her tell it, it was The. Best. Eggroll. Ever.
No one in my family doubted her. We tried desperately to find her an eggroll equal to that first one.
No one tried harder than my mother. It couldn't have been easy to try to replace what had become the gold standard of all things wrapped in a golden, crispy shell. But my mother tried. There were countless attempts. Each one was always met with my grandmother responding "almost" or "not quite" or "I'd give this a C minus."